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Beckner added that he had started a petition for a recount and already had 18,000 signatures. He was confident a recount would happen, and that Trump would “absolutely” emerge as the winner.

Many supporters were fueled by a combination of mistrust of state ballot counts and the media, and a conviction that Trump had, in fact, won the presidency – it just wasn’t being reported.

Roknic, among others, said he believed the coronavirus pandemic was “orchestrated” and had a role in turning the election to the Democrats

Asked about the issue of child separation, one of the most controversial of Trump’s policies, and which predominantly affected Latin American migrants at the southern border, Juarez said she didn’t believe they were actually separated.

“We just want an audit for the vote, I’m not trying to say there is voter fraud necessarily,” he said. “But the fact that some high officials are denying an audit, is ludicrous.”

A Muslim, he said Trump had condemned white supremacists and racism, and that Trump’s Muslim ban wasn’t a ban against Muslims, but happened to be concern countries with large Muslim populations.

By late afternoon, Trump supporters thronged outside the supreme court, where they were met by a crowd of counter-protesters. The two groups were separated by a barricade and law enforcement officers, but still briefly collided after rumors spread that members of the Proud Boys extremist group were present.

after Gov. Doug Burgum, a Republican, used an executive order on Nov. 13 to institute precisely such a mandate, a poll showed that a significant majority of North Dakotans favored it.

the state definitely should have taken that step last spring or summer — before the number of coronavirus cases skyrocketed, before hospitals were so overrun that sick North Dakotans had to be sent to neighboring states and before his own mother tested positive and died in early October.

Until recently, Governor Burgum was loath to exert much pressure on North Dakotans and steered clear of the social-distancing orders put in place by so many other states. But he did invest heavily in testing and never merrily shrugged off the threat of the coronavirus the way his Republican counterpart in South Dakota, Gov. Kristi Noem, did.

South Dakota, in contrast, was No. 1. Still no mask mandate there, and no leadership at all from Noem, who didn’t just welcome but beckoned President Trump to Mount Rushmore for that enormous Independence Day rally, the one at which his perpetually maskless entourage clustered near a similarly maskless crowd

Just before Thanksgiving, Noem announced the passing of her 98-year-old grandmother, one of 13 residents of a South Dakota nursing home who died in a two-week period. The home’s administrator told The Daily Beast that the other 12 residents, along with many of the nursing home’s workers, had tested positive for the coronavirus, but not Noem’s grandmother. (Hmmm …) While Noem publicly mourned her lost family member, she drew no particular attention to Covid-19’s rampage among her grandmother’s companions.

wrote to him to share a famous quotation from Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

They “scream at you for a magic medicine” and warn that Joe Biden will ruin America even as they’re “gasping for breath,” she wrote. She added: “They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that ‘stuff’ because they don’t have Covid because it’s not real.”

“They stop yelling at you when they get intubated,” she wrote. “It’s like a horror movie that never ends.”

The truth is that the Dakotas are as emblematic as they are exceptional

In resisting the lockdowns, slowdowns and sacrifices that many other states committed to, they indulged and encouraged a selective (and often warped) reading of scientific evidence, a rebellion against experts and a twisted concept of individual liberty that was obvious all over the country and contributed mightily to our suffering.

“North Dakotans will come to each other’s aids in a heartbeat, but when asked to give up personal freedom for an amorphous common good — that’s difficult,

When I said “horror story,” I was cribbing. That was a description used in a series of mid-November tweets from a South Dakota emergency room nurse, Jodi Doering, that went viral. Doering was reeling from tending to dying Covid-19 patients who continued to insist that the coronavirus was some kind of hoax.

“We maybe believed that our rural nature sheltered us from what cities like yours were experiencing,” Carson said. “Then we found out, very brutally, that was wrong.”

The first 800,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for Britain were transported in recent days from a manufacturing plant in Belgium to government warehouses in Britain, and then to hospitals

First to receive the vaccine will be doctors and nurses, certain people aged 80 and over, and nursing home workers.

Hundreds of people are still dying in Britain each day from the virus, and the country has made allowances for travel over the Christmas period that scientists fear will seed another uptick in infections.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the United States’s top infectious disease expert, said last week that the British had not reviewed the vaccine “as carefully” as the United States was.

Once enough people get vaccinated, it will become very difficult for the virus to find vulnerable people to infect. Life may start approaching something like normal by the fall of 2021.

Tens of thousands of people have already received the vaccines, and none of them have reported any serious side effects. Some have felt aches and flulike symptoms that last less than a day.

Pfizer’s vaccine offers strong protection after the first dose, F.D.A. finds.

The coronavirus vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech provides strong protection against Covid-19 within about 10 days of the first dose, according to documents published on Tuesday by the Food and Drug Administration before a meeting of its vaccine advisory group.

Many experts have expressed concern that the coronavirus vaccines might protect some people better than others. But the results in the briefing materials indicate no such problem.

What that index didn't take into account — and what has compounded months of governmental failures — is that even before COVID-19 arrived on its shores, the U.S. was an unusually sick country for its level of wealth and development.

High blood pressure, obesity and metabolic disorders are all on the rise in the U.S.

Healthy life expectancy — the number of years people can expect to live without disability — is 65.5 years in the U.S., more than two decades fewer than in Japan.

65,700 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2019, more than double the number in 2010. Those deaths account for more than half of all drug overdose fatalities worldwide and held down life expectancy in the U.S.

Mortality for mothers and children under 5 is 6.5 per 1,000 live births in the U.S., compared to 4.9 for other wealthy countries.

All in all, more than 40% of American adults have a pre-existing health condition that puts them at higher risk of severe COVID-19.

A study published in August found cardiovascular disease can double a patient's risk of dying from COVID-19, while diabetics — who number more than 30 million in the U.S. — are 1.5 times more likely to die.

Context: Lancet Editor-in-Chief Richard Horton has called COVID-19 a "syndemic" — a synergistic epidemic of a new and deadly infectious disease and numerous underlying health problems. The U.S. is squarely in the heart of that syndemic.

Those conditions are particularly prevalent in minority communities with unequal health care access that have disproportionately suffered from COVID-19.

A report from McKinsey earlier this month estimated that poor health costs the U.S. economy about $3.2 trillion a year

For every $1 invested in targeting population health, the U.S. stands to gain almost $4 in economic benefit, and altogether health improvements could add up to a 10% boost to U.S. GDP by 2040.

The bottom line: There is no excuse for the way the U.S. has mishandled COVID-19, but the seeds of this catastrophe were planted well before the novel coronavirus arrived on American shores.

2. How movement spread COVID-19

What's happening: Researchers in Germany studied the effect of entry bans and mandatory quarantines on COVID-19 mortality, and found the earlier such measures were implemented, the greater the effect they had on limiting deaths.

Of note: The study found mandatory quarantines for incoming travelers were more effective than outright entry bans, largely because such bans often exempted citizens and permanent residents, while quarantines usually applied to everyone.

The U.S. lost track of at least 1,600 people flying in from China in just the first few days after the ban went into effect, according to reporting from the AP.

Border controls are of little use if governments don't track and quarantine travelers coming from infected areas.

The bottom line: A virus only moves with its host. One lesson we should learn for future pandemics is that restricting that movement is key to controlling a new pathogen, even though the costs of such controls will only grow in a globalized world.

On Thursday, nine states reported their record high single-day of new cases ever

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy told CNN Friday that he attributed the rise in cases to the cold, "fatigue" and indoor private gatherings.

"The fall/winter surge should lead to a daily death toll that is approximately three times higher than now by mid-January. Hospital systems, particularly ICUs, are expected to be under extreme stress in December and January in 18 states."

"If states do not react to rising numbers by re-imposing mandates, cumulative deaths could reach 514,000 by the same date," the IHME said in its latest forecast.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington School of Medicine says it is most likely that by the middle of January, 2,250 Americans will be dying every day from the coronavirus -- three times more than the current rate.

Forty-three states have shown an increase in cases compared to last week, with five holding steady and two -- Oklahoma and Louisiana -- reporting a decline, according to JHU.

"We are at an unsustainable growth rate," said Dr. Jason Mitchell Thursday. Mitchell is the chief medical officer at Presbyterian Healthcare Services, which operates nine regional hospitals in New Mexico

Mitchell says the state's rate of case growth is averaging about 5% a day, which would result in catastrophic numbers if there's no effort to change the trend

A CNN investigation of 17 Trump campaign rallies finds that 14 of the host counties had an increased rate of new Covid-19 cases one month after the rally.

CNN evaluated the rate of new daily cases per 100,000 residents at four weeks before the rally, on the rally date, and four weeks after the rally at the county level and at the state level.

Of the 14 host counties that had increased infection rates, eight of them had declining rates of infection in the month before the rally. The other six counties already had increasing rates of infection in that preceding month.

CNN's analysis also found that in 10 counties, the new rates of infection were growing faster than the overall rate for the state.

acism leads to social vulnerability, she said, with people holding low wage jobs that place them at higher risk of infection and living in crowded neighborhoods and households.

situations that tend to apply more often to people of color — are getting sick and dying from Covid-19 at a much higher rate than the rest of the population.

If the C.D.C. committee follows the National Academy’s framework, 10 percent of the total amount of vaccine available would be reserved for people in hard-hit communities.

The first phase offers a vaccine to health care workers, a large group that constitutes at least 15 million people and includes low-wage workers, such as nursing assistants and housekeepers in nursing homes.

60 million essential workers who are not in health care

When the first two phases of vaccines are distributed, 1.7 million more doses would be offered to mostly worse-off Black and Hispanic communities using the vulnerability index preferred by the National Academies than with the deprivation index, he and other colleagues reported in another paper.

The allocation proposal, “is built on the assumption that people who for generations have been underserved and disadvantaged should get a leg up if we can afford it,” said Dr. Matthew Wynia, an ethicist and infectious disease physician at the University of Colorado. But, he said, leaders in some states may refuse.

A different plague strain enters Europe through Genoa, brought by another Caffan ship that docks there. The Genoans attack the ship and drive it away, but they are still infected. Italy faces this second strain while already battling the previous one.

Y. pestis also heads east from Sicily into the Persian Empire and through Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Poland, and south to Egypt, as well as Cyprus, which is also hit with destruction from an earthquake and deadly tidal wave at the same time.

The plague also moves through Austria and Switzerland, where a fury of anti-Semitic massacres follow it along the Rhine after a rumor spreads that Jews had caused the plague by poisoning wells

The plague awakes an anti-Semitic rage around Europe, causing repeated massacres of Jewish communities, with the first one taking place in Provence, where 40 Jews were murdered.

the plague kills 60 percent of the Venetian population.

A group of religious zealots known as the Flagellants first begin to appear in Germany. These groups of anywhere from 50 to 500 hooded and half-naked men march, sing and thrash themselves with lashes until swollen and bloody. Originally the practice of 11th-century Italian monks during an epidemic, they spread out through Europe. Also known for their violent anti-Semitism,

The plague enters England through the port of Melcombe Regis, in Dorset. As it spreads through the town, some escape by fleeing inland, inadvertently spreading it further.

An English ship brings the Black Death to Norway when it runs aground in Bergen

While waiting on the border to begin the attack, troops became infected, with 5,000 dying. Choosing to retreat, the soldiers bring the disease back to their families and a third of Scotland perishes.

The plague’s spread significantly begins to peter out, possibly thanks to quarantine efforts, after causing the deaths of anywhere between 25 to 50 million people, and leading to the massacres of 210 Jewish communities. All total, Europe has lost about 50 percent of its population.

With the Black Death considered safely behind them, the people of Europe face a changed society

It becomes easier to get work for better wages and the average standard of living rises.

researchers found that people with obesity who caught the coronavirus were more than twice as likely to end up in the hospital and nearly 50 percent more likely to die of Covid-19. Another study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, showed that among nearly 17,000 hospitalized Covid-19 patients in the United States, more than 77 percent had excess weight or obesity.

Similar links were unmasked during the H1N1 flu pandemic of 2009, when researchers began to notice that infected people with obesity were more likely to wind up in the hospital and to die. Flu vaccines administered in subsequent years performed poorly in individuals with extra weight, who fell ill more often than their peers even after getting their shots

Large amounts of fat, for instance, can compress the lower parts of the lungs, making it harder for them to expand when people breathe in.

When obesity enters the picture, Dr. Beck said, some of the immune cells found in 30-year-old people “look like those of an 80-year-old.”

If the immune systems of people with obesity are more prone to pathogen amnesia, then they may need different dosages of a vaccine. Some products might not work at all in people carrying extra weight

Ms. Franklin’s case of Covid-19 was more moderate than her sister’s. But she still deteriorated quickly, to the point where she could no longer reach the bathroom without assistance.

Three key shifts in the state helped Democrats this year: a growing Latino population that leans Democratic, a surge in voters moving to Arizona from more liberal states like California and Illinois, and the way suburban voters have starkly broken with a Republican Party led by someone like Trump.

Arizona, by going blue, is moving closer to its neighbor to the northwest -- Nevada, where Democrats have taken control of almost all aspects of government

Maricopa is the fastest-growing county in the country, transforming over the last two decades into a sprawling mass of metropolitan hubs, sun-scorched planned communities and bustling strip malls.

"Maricopa County won the state of Arizona for Mark Kelly and Joe Biden," said Steven Slugocki, chair of Maricopa County's Democrats. "Here in Maricopa, we committed our resources to contact voters of color, women and traditionally underrepresented groups throughout the state. Our strategy proved to be effective."

Biden is just the second Democrat to win Arizona since 1948, when Harry Truman won. Bill Clinton narrowly won the state in 1996, but Arizona moved further right in the next two decades, electing hard-line immigration proponents like Gov. Jan Brewer and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and passing laws like SB 1070, a controversial state law that required officers to make immigration checks while enforcing other laws if "reasonable suspicion" of illegal immigration exists.

The Democratic victory builds on the work by grassroots organizations on the ground in Arizona, many of which focused on the state's growing Latino population by uniting around the opposition to Arpaio and the immigration crackdown

"This year was a victory for the decade-plus of work in this state," said Laura Dent, the executive director of Chispa Arizona

"It has been a decade-plus of building and the sustained work of organizing between electoral cycles have been critical."

Dent said the organizing around SB 1070 was a "catalyst" for these groups to unify around something and "build that collective power" on display this year

"I thought by 2024, Arizona would be for real a swing state," said Yasser Sanchez, an immigration lawyer who volunteered for Republican Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign and worked for McCain's 2016 reelection to the Senate before rejecting a Trump-led Republican Party and helping organize Latino voters for Biden. "Every time I heard it would be before, I thought that was wishful thinking."

Looming over Biden's victory is the legacy of McCain, an Arizona stalwart whose "maverick" conservatism carried a coalition of Democrats, independents and Republicans for years in the state.

Trump to double down on his mocking attacks of the Republican senator, even after he died in 2018. This, along with comments Trump reportedly made about military members and veterans, spurred McCain's widow, Cindy McCain, to back Biden, an endorsement that was front page news in the state.

But Arizona was considered so reliably red in 2014 that a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California-Los Angeles dubbed Mesa -- a sprawling suburb east of Phoenix -- the "most conservative American city."

"Ten years ago, if you wanted to be politically relevant and if you wanted your vote to have an impact, you were foolish to be registered as a Democrat because they failed to field a candidate for some offices," said Mesa Mayor John Giles, a registered Republican in a nonpartisan job. "And even then, it was just volunteering to get killed in the general by the Republican."

"I am hoping to change the state blue," Schaefer said after casting her ballot. "Believe me, I have tried to turn everybody that I can possibly turn."

"Trump is dangerous for the country," Hudock said after voting days before the election. "In the last four years, Republicans have shown their true colors. ... I just wish there was a centrist party.

That quickly changed as the virus spread throughout the state, with more than 160,000 cases and 3,600 people dying in Maricopa County alone.

Biden's win in Arizona was not for a lack of trying on Trump's part. The President held seven events in the state in 2020. Biden held one event after the Democratic National Convention over the summer, a bus tour around Maricopa in October.

The most we can hope for at this point are policies that mitigate the suffering, getting us through the horror while we wait for widespread vaccination. And a few days ago it seemed possible that we would in fact get some good news on the economic front.

For Americans who won’t be able to return to work while the pandemic is still raging, a one-time payment of $600 is grossly inadequate, while for those who haven’t lost their jobs it’s unnecessary.

President Trump is still trying, in ever more desperate and destructive ways, to overturn the results of the election. And in his madness he may imagine that he will gain more politically from sending everyone another check with his name on it than from helping those truly in need.

Staff on the frontlines say they are increasingly battling burnout after months of devastation and with a dark winter ahead. “I’ve seen younger people come in through the door, and be admitted right away to the ICU,”

It was frustrating that the public no longer seemed to be taking Covid protocols seriously, Santini said. “Every day we go to work, we’re putting our lives and our family’s lives on the line.”

“Even lower-risk activities now carry substantial risk because there is more virus out there than ever before. Simply put and bluntly put, we can’t get away with things that we’ve been able to get away with so far.”

Some restaurants have invested thousands in outdoor dining infrastructure they hoped would last them through the pandemic, only to see those facilities ordered to close.

the organization’s research has shown that 43% of restaurant owners are unsure whether their business will survive the next six months. “People who started out frustrated – today they are feeling just outright desperate.”

the latest Covid surge continues to shine a harsh light on inequality. California has seen record levels of unemployment and countless businesses have been shuttered for good, yet some sectors – notably the tech industry – have continued to rake in revenue.

post-pandemic, California could see a so-called “K-shaped recovery”, where the incomes of the highest earners continue to rise just as quickly as they plummet for those who are struggling.

Latinos in LA county, many of whom are working essential jobs, are also contracting the virus at more than double the rate of white residents. The toll in working-class neighborhoods has been especially devastating for undocumented people, who have been unable to access aid.

“We have the confluence of factors where people are facing financial instability, and feel like they have no choice but to work even if they get sick,” she said. “And particularly in California, we have a large population of undocumented people who have been demonized by the federal government and are especially vulnerable.”

Donald Trump has not had a habit of attending church services weekly, though he made several appearances at the Episcopal church in West Palm Beach near his resort as well as at various evangelical churches across the country.

Barack Obama would go to church for the occasional Christmas or Easter service in Washington or on vacation in Hawaii, but rarely during the rest of the year. And George W. Bush, despite being a high-profile born-again Christian, tended to worship privately as president and only attended church when back home in Texas.

He fashioned himself as the candidate standing up for morality and decency, fighting for the soul of America and calling on the country to "embark on the work that God and history have called upon us to do."

He's open about and proud that he's a Catholic,"

"Joe's faith isn't just part of who he is," said Sen. Chris Coons, the Democrat from Delaware and a friend of Biden's. "It's foundational to who he is."

He attended Catholic schools and married his first wife, Neilia, in a Catholic church. He peppers his political speech with quotes from Scripture, Catholic hymns and references to the nuns and priests he learned from in school.

And while it's unclear whether he will adopt a permanent parish in Washington during his term, Biden's churchgoing will not only provide a window into his spiritual side. It will also be core to his political brand -- apparent not just in the pursuit of his policy agenda but even in his schedule as President.

Since childhood, Biden has been a regular at Mass. He frequently worships with family members, often attending with some of his grandchildren in tow.

While touring across the country in his presidential campaign, Biden would quietly slip into a local Catholic church for Mass -- often coming in a few minutes late or leaving a few minutes early, to avoid the rush. He was even spotted attending daily Mass on Election Day at his parish in Wilmington, Delaware.

On the day Biden was inaugurated as Vice President in 2009, he asked O'Brien to preside over a private Mass at Georgetown beforehand

These services, said the priest, reflected how important the Catholic faith and ritual were to Biden, particularly on two of the most joyful days of his life. But his faith in Christ and devotion to the church also bolstered Biden during his lowest moments.

The President-elect, who regularly wears his late son's rosary on his wrist, has publicly spoken about the role his faith has played in carrying him through grief.

"I'm not trying to proselytize, I'm not trying to convince you to be, to share my religious views. But for me it's important because it gives me some reason to have hope and purpose," Biden shared earlier this year during a CNN town hall with a grieving pastor who'd lost his wife during the Charleston shooting, explaining that he'd promised his own dying son that he would continue to stay engaged and not retreat into himself.

Catholics have become integrated into American public life to the point where Biden's religious affiliation is just another point in his biography. The last three Speakers of the House have been Catholics, and so are the majority of justices on the Supreme Court. Biden was the first Catholic to serve as vice president.

CNN's exit polls showed Catholics were nearly evenly split, with 52% supporting Biden and 47% supporting Trump. That's an improvement for Biden over Hillary Clinton's performance with Catholics four years ago, when she lost them to Trump 50% to 46%.

Ashley McGuire, a senior fellow at the conservative Catholic Association, said it will be difficult to separate Biden's liberalism on abortion and contraception from how he's viewed by Catholics -- especially because of how his campaign emphasized his faith.

"The issues where people have been the most divided and where the political left and the political right, and Catholics, have been so split are the issues where that department is going to be involved," McGuire said. "It was his move, and he sort of set a tone that suggests attack. And that's unfortunate."

"His faith is reflective of his compassion and empathy, his commitment to the vulnerable, and his service to the country," said O'Brien.

And hospitalizations have remained above 100,000 for 12 consecutive days

all of the flights carrying the vaccine had taken off from the Louisville, Kentucky, airport and nearly all of the ground deliveries had departed.

One of the biggest challenges the carrier faces is maintaining the temperature needed for the vaccine, he said.

"The minus-100-degree requirement with dry ice, making sure it moves, making sure the temperature is maintained, making sure the dry ice that follows the shipment after the vaccine arrives, that's important also," he said. "Making sure that we coordinate the kits that are going out ahead of the vaccine so the administration sites have everything they need to do the dosing as soon as tomorrow morning."

The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center expects the first doses of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine to be delivered between 9:15 and 9:30 a.m. Monday morning, hospital spokesperson, Alexis Shaw said in a statement to CNN.

they plan to begin vaccinating about 20 to 30 of the hospital's "prioritized, high risk frontline health care workers" within 1 to 1.5 hours.

Sisolak said plans are in place to distribute the first allocation to frontline health care workers and staff and residents in the nursing facilities for "immediate vaccination."

More than 90% of California residents are under orders to stay at home, except for essential needs like grocery shopping, banking, and doctor appointments. The state mandated residents to stay at home once ICU capacity for the region fell below 15%.

"We are at a critical point," Sisolak said, "We will be monitoring and evaluating our current situation day to day and week by week will remain under the current restrictions for now, with the goal of getting through the next month."

Sunday marked the third consecutive day California had over 30,000 daily new positive coronavirus cases, according to data released by the California Department of Public Health.

An initial 62,000 doses will be distributed to 40 facilities and 29 counties, Michele Roberts, Acting Assistant Secretary of the Washington Department of Health said.

"Today's news means we will see an end to this pandemic," Inslee said. But he warned that residents should continue heading safety precautions despite the start of vaccinations. "I want to be clear, this does not change the importance of our safety precautions. Masking, physical distancing and limiting interactions is just as important tomorrow as it was yesterday."

"You still need to think of yourself as potentially contagious even though you are protected from getting sick at a very high percentage of certainty," Dr. Francis Collins told NBC's Chuck Todd on "Meet the Press."

"Masks are still going to be part of our life. We need to recognize that and not step away or start to drop our guard," said Collins.

"I think all reasonable people, if they had the chance to sort of put the noise aside and disregard all those terrible conspiracy theories, would look at this and say, 'I want this for my family, I want it for myself,'" he said of the vaccine. "People are dying right now. How could you possibly say let's wait and see if that might mean some terrible tragedy is going to befall," he said.

If authorized, the US plans to start by shipping about 6 million doses across the country, said Gen. Gustave Perna, chief operating officer of Operation Warp Speed.

"We're going to have enough for 20 million people to get vaccinated by the end of December," Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said.

About 2.9 million doses of the vaccine either have been or will be received nationwide this week. That's enough to start vaccinating 1.45 million people, since each person needs two doses.

The CDC has recommended that health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities get the vaccine first.

In the past week, the US has reported an average of more than 215,000 new infections a day, according to Johns Hopkins University.

More than 300,000 people in the US have died from coronavirus in 10 months, according to Johns Hopkis.

And another 186,000 are projected to die over the next three months, according to the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. "

"There are tens of thousands of Black and brown people dying every year because they are distrustful of the system," Adams said. "In many cases, rightly so, but also because they're not getting the facts to help restore their trust in the system."

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom said that while the vaccines offered a moment of hope, he added "we are in the midst of the worst moment of this pandemic."

Los Angeles County health officials said Monday new cases have increased 625% since November 1, with "younger people continuing to drive the increase in community transmission."

"Our reality is frightening at the moment," they said in a statement. "By next weekend, there are likely to be over 5,000 patients hospitalized and more than 50% of ICU beds occupied by COVID-19 patients."

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio hinted at tighter restrictions in the coming weeks, saying the city was on a "very troubling" trajectory, "in terms of the number of people who get sick, the number of people we would lose ... and obviously the impact on hospitals, their ability to treat people."

"We will be monitoring and evaluating our current situation day to day and ... (we) will remain under the current restrictions for now, with the goal of getting through the next month."

"If officials and experts agree that our trends are going beyond our ability to respond, I will be forced to come in front of you all again with tougher actions."

The truth is that all of Silicon Valley, not just Facebook, is in desperate want of a big new idea.

We may always feel like we’re on our phones too much, that we’re already devoting a surfeit of time to our screens, but the truth is we have much more time to give our platforms. If we had screens over our eyes, we could be captive consumers of content and advertising quite literally all the time. Not only that, but if the metaverse went mainstream, it would necessitate a whole swath of new hardware and profit-generating apps too.

The industry needs this framework—at a moment of “unprecedented liquidity for VC funds,” as the investor Matt Cohen put it at Crunchbase, investors are dying for something like a metaverse to pour capital into.

Allowing this company—this industry—to rush headlong into building anything remotely metaverse-like would merely reproduce, if not exacerbate, the problems that arose when it hastily launched the social-media platforms that now define online life.

with Facebook desperately trying to change the terms of the game, Zuckerberg looking to assert himself as more than just the operator of a particularly toxic yearbook feed, and the conditions ripe for the industry to pour cash into the pieces necessary to build some metaverse-shaped thing, they may just wind up succeeding—and replicating outright the dystopian metaverse their source material has warned us about.

crossing the Rubicon. Schnurer argues that this is more than just a familiar phrase. And he says that a U.S. Rubicon moment is in view—which would be triggered by a possible indictment of Donald Trump.

Crossing the Rubicon: If the United States, in recent years, has been tracking the decline and fall of Republican Rome, when do we pass the point of no return? By Eric B. Schnurer

How did a wealthy, powerful, and successfully self-governing people—proud of their frontier origins, piety and traditional values, and above all their origin story in throwing off monarchical rule—essentially commit democratic suicide and settle, more-or-less willingly, for a half-millennium of dictatorship?

From rising economic inequality, political violence, and governmental dysfunction on through the generally lackadaisical reaction of the Senate to a losing chief-executive candidate’s conspiracy to murder many of them, overthrow the government, and thereby block certifying his defeat, events in ancient Rome have remarkably paralleled some you might recognize more recently

What might signal the end of democracy as we know it?  There is, it turns out, an easy answer at hand.

While there is no precise end date to the Republic, there was a bright-line occurrence generally recognized as the irreversible beginning of the end for participatory government.

there is indeed an event looming—probably before the end of this year— that poses almost precisely the same situation as what provoked Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon: the possible indictment of former president Donald J. Trump.

January 6th. It is no coincidence that insurrectionists that day carried banners urging Trump to “Cross the Rubicon” and declaring “The Die Is Cast”— Caesar’s words upon alighting on the Italian side of the river—or that they will be with him to storm the forces of the Republic and ignite a civil war over Trump’s potential indictment:

Avoiding criminal prosecution is precisely why Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his army and ignited a civil war 21 centuries ago.

Caesar’s ultimate rise had begun with the Cataline conspiracy a decade or so earlier, which, as noted, bears a familial resemblance to Trump’s attempts to overturn the recent election and, both literally and figuratively, decapitate the government.

Senate conservatives, known as the optimates (i.e., “the Best People”),  chose largely to shrug off both the immediate assault on the state and the long-term threat Caesar in particular posed to republicanism.  They soon lived to regret it.

The patricians who ruled Rome, however, had long resisted fundamental economic reforms to benefit the great mass of the population, making only such concessions as necessary when times grew tense. This simply increased the internal tensions within society as the economy globalized, making those with the means richer and richer, hollowing out the middle class, and leaving more and more Romans at the edge of desperation.

Will the Trumpist party similarly ultimately prevail once they cross the Rubicon? I have been predicting for years that something resembling a civil war will arise and something like Trumpists likely will carry the day in the short-term

three of these—Caesar, of course, plus Marcus Licinius Crassus, known as “the richest man in Rome,” and Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey the Great), the undisputedly dominant figure of the era—formed a Triumvirate and became, between them, the sole possessors of real power. The only real question was which one would prevail as the sole autocrat,

Caesar thus hoped to temporize, reach some sort of cohabitation arrangement with Pompey, and eventually prevail in the long term. But his enemies forced his hand with the threat of imminent criminal prosecution.

Caesar paused with his army on the Gaul side of the Rubicon.

His only path was forward. As he crossed, he uttered the famous phrase, “Alea iacta est”: “The die is cast.” The phrase has taken on the meaning of an inevitability, but Caesar meant quite the opposite: that, while he was committed and could not turn back, the outcome was far from inevitable but, rather, a tremendous gamble. At least for him.

The outcome for the Republic itself, however, was indeed at that point already cast as if in iron rather than in tumbling dice. Whatever the outcome of the ensuing war, whether Caesar or Pompey prevailed as dictator, the Republic—a system of self-government in which disputes were settled by politics rather than force, where power was dispersed rather than concentrated—was dead.

The defenders of the Republic folded more quickly than the French Army in World War II and left Rome open to Caesar.

Rome was now—and ever would remain—a dictatorship.

When Trump’s supporters urge him to cross the Rubicon and cast the die—events that become highly likely if he, like Caesar, faces indictment—that is what they contemplate.

What did all this mean for Rome?  And what might it mean for us?

Augustus essentially achieved the settlement of unreconcilable political, social, and economic strains within Republican Rome that even his uncle Julius could not attain. The Augustinian settlement was essentially to substitute peace and prosperity for politics, and to impose the veneer of traditional piety and moral values over the reality of an increasingly heterodox and heterogenous society.

The Augustinian Settlement had something for everyone. Augustus, ultimately the canniest politician, was himself outwardly pious, dutiful, traditional, and respectful of republican forms—thus appealing to conservatives—while he presided over a cultural efflorescence fueled by a liberality in everything except political expression

The concentration of power in the Emperor allowed Rome to mobilize its economic and military resources in a way that the Republic had not, leading to five centuries of expanding geopolitical power and economic opulence the likes of which the world had never seen before.

Politics essentially ended for half a millennium—all government was the will of one man—and so did freedom of political speech and thought. But Romans, at least if they were lucky, were free, safe and wealthy beyond imagination in every other way. It was a trade-off they were more than happy to accept.

By Caesar’s time, however, the populares were no longer so much true “Tribunes of the People” like the Gracchi, as ambitious patricians with an authoritarian bent who recognized anti-elite appeals to the disaffected mob as their pathway to power

But a reactionary philosophy that rejects fact in favor of fantasy, is economically retrograde and socially repugnant to the majority of Americans, can impose its rule for only so long.

Governments as we know them today will be left to fill the role solely of the traditionalist “night watchman state”—maintaining physical order and extracting a “protection” fee in return—much like the ancient Roman state. The demise of liberal democracy, the end of virtually all politics, and perhaps a little performative traditionalism and a destructive civil war, may all be coming, anyway. But, in return, Blue America, like Rome, will be able to carry on pretty much as it wishes, rising to new heights of wealth and global power.

Will highly-educated Americans really be willing to settle for physical security and financial success beyond anything now imaginable, in return for abandoning the American Republic for an enlightened dictatorship?

The Roman experience isn’t very encouraging on that score—but neither are contemporary Democrats.

When the crisis came, it was the optimates (i.e., “the Best People”) who were the last defenders of the Republic.

Why? Because the status quo worked for them, whereas the plebeians had long-since lost faith in “the system.” The supporters of the Republic were the cream of Roman society, those who, as the saying went, “had Greek” (world-class educations), married amongst themselves, and passed these advantages on to their children.

The republican structures they defended—elections, limited and dispersed powers, rule of law—in turn supported the rest of their existing order: an increasingly globalized economy exacerbating distributional divides but benefiting their own class.

The optimates were tone deaf to the needs of those struggling to make a living, while the insurrectionists played to the working class in order to destroy what passed for democracy and impose their personal rule.

Rich, out-of-touch, socially liberal democrats versus rich, demagogic authoritarians masquerading as the party of the working class—not far off from today. The difference is that progressives don’t recognize that they’re the new optimates.

Increasingly-illiberal “progressives” are slowly losing not just the white working class but also Black and Latino workers, those for whom they think they speak.

Meanwhile, time grows short. As aggrieved souls are forced from their dying communities and traditional social structures, into a metropolitan economy that has no place for them, the army on the Rubicon draws closer every day to the city’s walls.

The point is that the MSM universe is so large that you’re always going to be able to cherry-pick examples to support the notion that “they” are feeding “us” false narratives.

We have had a robust conversation about whether the inflation we’re seeing is transitory, or not. There are different signals pointing in different directions. Of the thousands of people who make up the MSM, some give more credence to one view, some to the other.1

The same is true for literally every other example Sullivan cherry-picks. Jussie Smollett was not an “MSM narrative.” It was a crime-blotter case that the media reported, and then continued reporting on, even as the subsequent reporting took Smollett’s story apart.

Surely some people in or around the MSM were more credulous than they should have been. Some people were skeptical from the start. There was no “narrative” except the one that exists in Andrew Sullivan’s head.

And of the dozens of thousands of meta-stories the MSM has covered over the last five years, much of the reporting has added real value to our world, yes?

For instance, if you only relied on reporting from the MSM about COVID, you would have been much better informed than if you’d relied on, say, Facebook, or conservative media. Reporting on the 2020 election lawsuits and allegations of fraud in the MSM were, in the main, very helpful.

Undergirding Sullivan’s essay is a notion that someone ought to do something.

Remember: It wasn’t a faceless blob called “the media” that published the UVA story. It was Rolling Stone. And it was a collection of reporters at various “mainstream media outlets” who took the Rolling Stone story apart.

I mention this history not to damn the mainstream media, but to show that what Sullivan laments isn’t new. There is no golden past. People in the media make mistakes. Sometimes big ones. Bigger, even, than the “narrative” on the Covington kids.

What’s the Alternative?

Is the journalistic mode great? No. Like democracy, it is the worst system there is—except for all the others.

Well, we tried that. “Conservative media” in its modern incarnation—the Washington Times, Fox News, the Federalist—was created as a corrective to the endemic flaws in the mainstream media.

the Rolling Stone case is actually a proof of concept for the media.

The Federalist publishes snuff fantasies and COVID death-cult nonsense.

And conservative media criticism is so nakedly partisan that on occasions when conservative media makes a mistake—for instance, the Washington Examiner’s Muslim prayer-rugs-at-the-border story—the response from erstwhile “conservative media critics” was . . . [crickets].

In conservative media, there is no self-corrective outside of the legal system.2

Any Club at Hand

Why has Sullivan recently become so exercised about the dangers of MSM narratives? I suspect because we often write what we know.

In recent years Andrew Sullivan has been othered by parts of the MSM for sins against current political orthodoxy. To him, these recent developments feel like a big, all-consuming story. Because for him, personally, they have been.

someone has to defend the honor of the dreaded mainstream media. Because here is the very boring truth about “MSM narratives”:

The media is a vast space where actors and institutions are interconnected, but operate semi-independently, according to a variety of incentives. Sometimes independent actors make good-faith mistakes. Sometimes they make bad-faith mistakes. But in most cases—in nearly every case, actually—the marketplace of ideas eventually wins and the truth outs.

The MSM is like a giant peer-review system, but where the peer-reviewing takes place after publication. Jonathan Rauch talks about this at length in The Constitution of Knowledge—that the scientific enterprise and the journalistic enterprise have similar modes of operation.

The conservative broadcast ecosystem—Fox, OAN, Newsmax, talk radio—is so untethered from reality that their legal departments occasionally force them to air libel-remedy hostage videos condemning their own “reporting.” They air anti-vaccine nonsense and false-flag theories.

By its diffuse nature, the media can’t be optimized. There will always be flaws and inefficiencies.5

I’d argue that the mainstream media’s continued openness to self-correction over the last few years is evidence of its overall reliability and health—even in the face of our democracy having hit a real-deal constitutional crisis.

We are on the cusp of a media crisis that no one is talking about.

As we move toward 2024, the big concern should be how the media would cover an openly anti-democratic presidential candidate. Would they treat said candidate as a danger to America? Or would they attempt to remain neutral and pretend that he was just another generic politician doing normal political things?

What if Vichy France and Fascist Italy had drawn closer together in a “Latin front,” as they were discussing at the time?

What if the Japanese had attacked the British in Malaya and Singapore but not attacked the United States?

What if the German who spied for the Soviet Union in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, had not supplied his masters with accurate information on Japanese plans, allowing Stalin to move 20 divisions from the east and redeploy them to Moscow for the shattering counterattack of Dec. 5?

The other thing the book does effectively is to pay careful attention to how the timing of events played out around the world, especially in the pattern of reactions to Pearl Harbor.

One of the last surprises in this book is how many world leaders saw accurately from that moment how the future would unfold.